1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved data processing system and, in particular, to a method and apparatus for data storage protection using cryptography.
2. Description of Related Art
Most data processing systems contain sensitive data and sensitive operations that need to be protected. For example, the integrity of configuration information needs to be protected from illegitimate modification, while other information, such as a password file, needs to be protected from illegitimate disclosure. As another example, a data processing system needs to be able to reliably identify itself to other data processing systems.
An operator of a given data processing system may employ many different types of security mechanisms to protect the data processing system. For example, the operating system on the data processing system may provide various software mechanisms to protect sensitive data, such as various authentication and authorization schemes, while certain hardware devices and software applications may rely upon hardware mechanisms to protect sensitive data, such as hardware security tokens and biometric sensor devices.
The integrity of a data processing system's data and its operations, however, centers around the issue of trust. A data processing system's data and operations can be verified or accepted by another entity if that entity has some manner for establishing trust with the data processing system with respect to particular data items or particular operations.
Hence, the ability to protect a data processing system is limited by the manner in which trust is created or rooted within the data processing system. To address the issues of protecting data processing systems, a consortium of companies has formed the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) to develop and to promulgate open standards and specifications for trusted computing. According to the specifications of the Trusted Computing Group, trust within a given data processing system or trust between a data processing system and another entity is based on the existence of a hardware component within the data processing system that has been termed the trusted platform module (TPM).
A trusted platform module has been generally described in a platform-independent manner, but platform-specific descriptions have been created for certain classes of systems, such as personal computers (PC's). Existing hardware for trusted computing has focused on implementations for a single trusted platform module for a single system. This situation is sufficient for simple servers and PC's, which tend to be relatively low-performance computers that meet the needs of stand-along computational environments or client-side processing environments.
The resources of high-performance servers, though, are typically divided among the needs of concurrently executing applications. Many servers support a partitionable environment that leverages the strong isolation of execution environments under the supervision of a hypervisor. It would be desirable to be able to certify a partitionable environment as being part of a trusted platform, but it would be impractical to provide a single trusted platform module for every possible partition within a partitionable environment.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a mechanism for sharing the capabilities of a single trusted platform module and allowing it to function on a one-to-one basis with each partition within a data processing system.